The Wordy Shipmates Read Online Free Page B

Apostle Paul has a vision. In the vision, a Macedonian man appears and tells him, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” So Paul heads west.
    So westward sails the Arbella in 1630. And then one night almost three centuries later President William McKinley will pray to God and God will tell him to help the Filipinos by Christianizing them (even though they have been Catholics for two hundred years), “and the next morning,” he says, “I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our mapmaker) and told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.” So westward sail the gunboats toward Manila Bay. And then in the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, believing that the United States must “bear the burden . . . of helping freedom defend itself,” invades Vietnam; otherwise, he explains, “if we stop helping them, they will become ripe for internal subversion and a Communist take-over.” So westward sail the aircraft carriers toward Saigon Harbor. And then, because the U.S. will keep on going west to help people until we’re going east, the warships and the F-117 stealth fighters hurry toward the Persian Gulf. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush announced that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Five days earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and his words redrew the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, replacing the Indian with a citizen of Baghdad, begging, “Come over and help us.” Of the American invasion, Cheney claimed, “My belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” After all, we’re there to help.
    In the present-day United States, the Massachusetts Puritans’ laughable, naïve, and self-aggrandizing idea that they were leaving England partly to come over and help American Indians who were simply begging for their assistance has won out over the Founding Fathers’ philosophy of not firing shots in other countries’ wars. In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson argued for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”
    During the 2008 presidential primaries, the one candidate who brought up that Jefferson quote was outsider Con gressman Ron Paul, who equated being in favor of the war in Iraq with disagreeing with the Founders. “Since so many apparently now believe Washington and Jefferson were wrong on the critical matter of foreign policy,” he said, “they should at least have the intellectual honesty to admit it.” This sort of talk did not endear Paul to Republican primary voters.

    L et’s return to the coast of England in 1630 as John Cotton preaches to the Winthrop fleet. Cotton would have been aware of the pros-and-cons list Winthrop and his fellows in the Massachusetts Bay Company wrote and passed around among the godly, enumerating the reasons to go to America. In the various similar versions of this tract, Winthrop and Co. are trying to talk themselves and other potential colonists into going; but just as importantly, they’re also trying to justify the venture to loved ones they’re leaving behind, the family and friends who have a right to feel hurt if not downright insulted by this abandonment.
    Two things especially weigh on Winthrop and his shipmates—news from Europe and news at home. Over the previous dozen years, continental Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other relentlessly, from Sweden to Spain, from France to Bohemia, in what came to be known as the Thirty Years’ War. (As much as a fifth of the population of what would become Germany died.) The English couldn’t help but worry the war would spread across the Channel. As Thomas Hooker would preach not long after the Arbella sailed:
    Will you have England destroyed? Will you put the aged to trouble, and your young men to the sword? Will you have your